


Scars

by DeCarabas



Category: Bram Stoker - Dracula, Dracula & Related Fandoms
Genre: Gen, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2008, recipient:Xochiquetzl
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-25
Updated: 2008-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-22 12:20:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/237946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeCarabas/pseuds/DeCarabas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Quincey Morris makes a promise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scars

Quincey has never kept a journal like the Harkers, and he's never taken much in the way of notes like Jack. Even the few letters he writes, though not unfriendly, are always brief, to the point, practical invitations or responses. He doesn't record his memories in words. He doesn't need to. They've been etched into his body.

The skin of his hands is rough, cracked and calloused, and there are years of letters written in that, of firing a Winchester repeater for the first time, taking it apart, wiping it down, caring for it like his father had taught him to care for a good rifle, when his father had the time, when he wasn't busy with the business of oil. There are no calluses from too many hours clutching pen and ledger on Quincey's fingers; no, those calluses are from the first horse he ever trained, and the first horse he had to put down.

His moustache is carefully trimmed, his hair neatly slicked back under his hat, but there is dirt ingrained deep under his fingernails more often than not, and it's always been thus, a childhood spent on the ranch with the horses and the oilmen digging in the earth, first with shovels, then with the great machines, and that immense extended family that was the hired help always looking the other way, and the inevitable return home covered in dirt and late for dinner, and his mother's _what would your father say_ as he was rushed off to go wash up, though of course his father never said anything about it at all. It was good for a boy to strike out on his own.

He has no feeling in several of the toes on his left foot, and hasn't ever since hunting a man-eating tiger in India with Art. And if he was asked to tell the story he'd go with something about the tiger, but in all honesty they'd never found the beast. There'd been an accident with one of their guides and a jammed gun - not Quincey's. Quincey takes care of his own rifles.

And now his eyes are red and his face is growing paler from lack of sleep. He doesn't have nightmares of man-eating tigers, or of misfiring guns. He doesn't dream about horses and glue, or oil drills, of accidents, of his father's grave. Quincey's nightmares are of a head rolled to one corner of a coffin and stuffed with garlic. Though he'd never seen it with his eyes, Jack had spared him and Art that one last horror, still he sees it in the night. It's not the desecration of Lucy's body that wakes him, poor Lucy. Not the garlic, the stake, or the sheer, necessary gruesomeness of it.

It's the man holding the stake.

* * *

Her room had been dark throughout the day that she died, respectfully dark, so no one would have to look at it straight on, and that just made it worse. Quincey wanted the cold light of day, something to wipe out that heavy atmosphere, that sick, metallic taint to the air - he needed to see her. But it wasn't his needs that mattered. He'd been shoved to the back of the room, behind the servant girls and all their wailing. Behind where Art was standing, silent now.

Quincey didn't think anyone but he and Jack had seen the way Art had been shaking earlier that morning, in that one moment he'd had to stand on his own.

They'd made it to the drawing room, Jack and Art, before Art had collapsed; and then Jack had gone back to Lucy's bedside, back to take care of whatever had to be done there. And Quincey took care of what needed to be done here.

Later, when Art had pulled himself together enough to speak, or nearly, the only words that Quincey could make out had been "my fault." And, when Quincey had tried to find out just what Art meant by that, "I should have been there."

"I don't see as it would have made any difference," Quincey had said.

He couldn't see Art's face. Art was sunk deep into a leather armchair, looking small and swallowed by it, head hanging over his hands, the glass they were clutching half empty and forgotten.

And then he'd let Van Helsing hand Art that stake.

* * *

Mina Harker's memories have been etched into her skin for all to see, and Quincey knows what she's going to ask before she says it. But they have to hear it, she has to say it.

"You must promise me, one and all, even you, my beloved husband, that should the time come, you will kill me."

He'd been looking at Harker as Mina spoke. There's been no change in his expression - nothing at all. Quincey doesn't know Harker the way he knows Jack and Art, or he hadn't before all this horror, but he doesn't have to know a man so well to read that look. To see the moment before her words will break him.

Quincey has nightmares of the wrong man holding the stake. He thinks he'll have them as long as he lives.

This time, he doesn't wait to watch the man break.

He kneels before Mina, and he makes a promise.

  



End file.
